Death of a (car) salesman

Like anything, buying a new car has positive and negative parts to the journey. The excitement of choosing and test driving a shiny new vehicle has to be balanced with haggling with a salesman in a dealership and painfully avoiding the add-ons and extra warranties that they want to burden you with (and co-incidentally give them a bigger commission than on the car itself).

Yet, the internet was meant to remove middlemen and enable us to deal direct with the producer. It has worked in industries such as travel, where package holiday companies have had to reinvent themselves in an era of cheap flights, AirBnB and TripAdvisor. But for bigger ticket purchases we still rely on car dealers and estate agents rather than dealing directly with manufacturers or those selling their house.

The end of middlemen?So why are these middlemen still here and will they survive for much longer? After all, most buyers now read car reviews online, check manufacturer videos on YouTube, get information on options from websites, and can arrange finance quickly at the click of a mouse. No wonder that the average number of dealers that buyers visit when purchasing a new car has dropped from 5 to 1.6 in the US over the last ten years. As in a lot of fields, more and more research is carried out online without needing to interact with anyone, let alone a sweaty dealer in an ill-fitting suit.

Illustrating this trend, upstart electric car company Tesla is looking to go direct to customers in the US, cutting out dealers altogether. Other manufacturers are trying more limited experiments with special editions sold online only or dealerships remodelled to be more like the Apple Store, with advisors providing information and help, but no hard sell.

The pace of technology change within the car also threatens to make the dealer obsolete. Modern cars are computers on wheels, streaming data back to the manufacturer and able to refresh their operating system remotely without human (or mechanic) intervention. Tesla regularly updates the software on its car over the air– with an upgrade in January 2015 improving the performance of its Model S, meaning it can match the acceleration of a McLaren MP4-12C.

However as a recent piece in The Economist points out, changing the system will be difficult. Dealers are a powerful lobby, and while they don’t make much money on each new car they sell, the ancillary products and ongoing servicing relationship can be extremely lucrative. It also provides buyers with the opportunity to get a better deal by haggling between rival garages – if you have the inclination to do so.

I think that there are more basic reasons for any middleman, whether a car dealer or travel agent, to survive – adding value, trust and ease. These are important concepts for any company in the digital age to embrace and it is worth looking at your business with these in mind.

1. Adding valueWith the vast majority of information now a Google search away on the internet, and prices displayed for everyone to see, do you really add value or are you a hindrance to the process? Again, the Apple Store is a good example to follow. You can buy your iPad from one of a hundred shops or websites, but the help you receive and the ability to get your questions answered in a positive, unpatronising way naturally leads people to the Apple Store.

2. TrustDo consumers trust you? Or more to the point, do they trust you more than the manufacturer you represent? One of the factors I think will hold back the demise of dealerships is that consumers trust car makers less. You only have to look at botched recalls and unreported faults to see why. Car makers are also much more distant than your local dealership, making it difficult to build a relationship of trust. That’s not to say dealers are safe – they regularly top polls of least trustworthy occupations, but in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

3. EasePeople have to do more and more with less and less time. In many ways the internet has made us more time-poor. Whereas before a holiday could be booked by marching into the travel agency and asking what they had available, it now takes hours of internet research, comparing the relative locations of villas on Google Maps and poring over TripAdvisor reviews. Those middlemen that still have a place recognise that they need to make things easy, providing a helpful service that cuts down the time you need to spend and removes roadblocks from the customer journey, without charging the earth.

Looking at your own business, do you meet these three criteria? If not, it is time to change, before pressure from consumers and manufacturers squeezes you out of the market.

Why Revolutionary Measures?

Marketing is undergoing a revolution. The advent of social media provides the opportunity for one-to-one communication for the first time since the move to an industrial society. This blog will look at what this means for B2B PR and marketing, incorporating my own thoughts/rants and interests. Do let me know your feedback!

About me

I'm Chris Measures and I've spent the last 18 years creating and implementing PR and marketing campaigns for technology companies. I've worked with everyone from large quoted companies to fast growth start-ups, giving me unrivalled experience and ideas.
I'm now director of Measures Consulting, an agency that uses this expertise to deliver PR and marketing success for technology businesses.

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